The beautiful 24 minute film based on the book Varmints by Helen Ward and Marc Caste was nominated for a BAFTA and shortlisted for an Oscar last year. You can buy the book from we heart books and find out more on the film at the studio aka website here.
This really is a very important book and film, it’s message is something special to share with our children as our environment continues to be something we all strive to protect.
The complete original text with pop up illustrations = lovely.
||Available at the We Heart Books store||
One of our readers, Kayte, from Dallas, Texas, left a beautiful comment on a post we did earlier this month on Albert by Donna Jo Napoli and illustrated by Jim LaMarche. She wrote:
I love your blog and have been following for a long time. As I do often with recommended titles, I checked Albert out from the library. My daughter (3.5 years old) ADORES this story and asks for me to read it over and over (and over). We finally returned it to the library and I was overjoyed to find it used at a local shop. My daughter has been walking around with a straw nest filled with wooden eggs and a felt cardinal for three days. Thank you so much for giving us Albert!
We always love hearing from our readers and especially when they get some joy from books we mention! I wrote to Kayte and asked if she would be willing to share a photo of the straw nest, wooden eggs and felt cardinal… And here is what she sent us -
Isn’t it beautiful? What an incredible interpretation of a book – and so lovely to think of it being carried into real life in this way.
Kayte also told me that the eggs in this photo had originally been handpainted by her and her daughter after they read An Egg is Quiet by Dianna Aston and Sylvia Long.
This is another beautiful book, one that celebrates eggs in all their shapes and sizes, and perfect for littlies interested in nature. I’m so impressed by Kayte’s efforts to creatively apply elements of these books!
Do other people create craft or activities based on picture books they read? We’d love to hear about them!
I wonder who had the job of being inside Grug?
Happy Earth Day!
Illustration by Marc Simont from A Tree Is Nice 1956.
Helen of Orange You Lucky talks about how her children love Charlie and Lola – Look After Your Planet and how proud she is of their recycling skills.
On the front cover of The Age newspaper today there is a stunning illustration and poem, ‘From the Shadows’, written in response to the Victorian bushfires by the amazing Graeme Base, author and illustrator of incredible picture books such as Animalia and Enigma.
Prints of the illustration can purchased through The Age’s photo sales department with all profits of the sales going to the Red Cross Bushfire Appeal 2009.
I have had many favorites this year as I do every year. In 2008 I have really loved Cheeky Monkey, all of Anna Walker’s books and Lauren Child’s Goldilocks is just divine, but Why Is The Sky Blue? is my favorite for 2008.
Why Is The Sky Blue? is a non-fiction book for the toddler to age 6 age group. It is published by Ladybird Books in Australia and is a real surprise package. It is gorgeously presented on 100% recycled paper, a fantastic initiative by Ladybird for the future and answers all those curly nature questions that fascinate children and adults alike.
Amy Schimler’s illustrations make this book really, really beautiful and interesting. Amy, a talented artist writes a lovely blog called Red Fish Circle on which she shares her illustrative work as well as fabric’s she designs and creative photography.
In Why Is The Sky Blue?, Amy’s illustrations are punctuated with flaps to lift, tabs to pull, and wheels to turn that reveal the answers to the BIG questions. The best question I think is ‘How do penguins keep warm?’ but others include ‘Why do flowers smell?’, ‘What do bird’s say when they sing?’ and ‘Do fish drink?’.
Quirky, fun and educational, this has all the elements of a great book. All these fantastic questions and answers can keep little ones entertained for hours and are sure to lead to bigger questions and queries.
||Why Is The Sky Blue? is available online from the we heart books store||
Today Ned and I started swimming lessons again after a rather long absence. Although we have been to the pool as a family and splashed around, Ned was not sure about the water today at all.
This afternoon I dug out a book for us to read together called Swim, Little Wombat, Swim! by one of my favorite illustrators, Charles Fuge. Little Wombat has the most amazing expressions and is such a loveable little character.
In this book Wombat meets Platypus and has a little giggle at him because he looks funny and walks differently. When wombat falls in the stream Platypus rescues him and begins to teach him how to swim.
‘That afternoon, Little Wombat learnt to paddle like a dog…and dive like a frog!
The real centre of the storyline is friendship and accepting others differences but it is also a great book for introducing children to the concept of swimming and being taught to swim. Fuge’s illustrations are so expressive that they clearly show little ones the confidence and joy that Wombat gains from Platypus teaching him swimming skills.
There is a beautiful bind up edition of all the Wombat stories currently available called The Adventures of Little Wombat.
Another gorgeous book about swimming for older children is the picture book The Deep written by arguably Australia’s best storyteller, Tim Winton, and beautifully illustrated by Karen Louise. This book is about the ocean rather than a pool. The main character is Alice who despite living by the sea is scared of the ocean, the deep. Her brothers and sisters love the sea but Alice is afraid of what she can’t see beneath the surface. I can really relate to this book as I too am not sure about the sea and have never been quite comfortable in it but just as Alice finds sometimes you can just let yourself relax and discover its beauty.
||Swim, Little Wombat, Swim! available online from Amazon||
||The Deep available online from Amazon||
||The Adventures of Little Wombat available online from Amazon||
With so much awareness now of environmental issues here are our favorite green children’s books…
1. The Lorax (Dr. Seuss)
The original and the best children’s book about the perils of destroying your environment with greed and selfishness. “UNLESS someone like you…cares a whole awful lot…nothing is going to get better…It’s not.” Of course this picture book is typical Dr Seuss with wild tongue twisting rhymes and technicolour illustrations that almost require sunglasses to look at but it is also probably Seuss’ most important and prophetic work. The Once-ler describes how he has decimated the Loraxs’ habitat with deforestation and air and water pollution to set up his manufacturing plants, leading to the poor Loraxs’ extinction. Check out the Lorax Earth Day website- help the real Lorax forests.
2. Weslandia (Paul Fleischman and Kevin Hawkes) 
This beautiful picture book is so very important in many ways. Protagonist Wesley is bullied at school because he doesn’t conform to what his peers consider normal, for example he doesn’t like pizza! While he is on school holidays and with no friends to play with he decides to create himself a self sustainable civilisation. He uses a plot of earth and grows a crop of ’swist’ a plant of his own creation that takes off soon towering above him and and bearing bizarre looking fruit. Soon Wesley discovers that he can use his strange crop as a multitude of things including clothing and shelter thus creating his ‘Weslandia’. Kevin Hawkes beautifully illustrates Wesley’s utopia giving little children a lavish landscape to admire while older children will grasp the themes of environment and social conscience.
3. We are the Weather Makers : The story of Global Warming (Tim Flannery)
This revised and updated version of Australian Tim Flannery’s best selling book on climate change is for a young adult audience, the children who it seems will inherit all these environmental issues from previous generations. This is science without all the jargon, in depth Flannery explains all the problems regarding the climate and also explores the solutions but all in a way that is easy to digest and understand. It is broken into chapters on each issue and has been printed in an excellent easy to read type. Marketed for an audience of 9 to 90 this is a great introduction to the world we live in today.
4. Scarlette Beane (Karen Wallace and Jon Berkeley)
The acrylic illustrations in this picture book are just so gorgeous. Scarlette is adorable with her face as red as a beet and little green fingers. On her fifth birthday she receives a small garden all of her own and begins to plant. Her vegies grow and grow until her whole neighborhood is enjoying the spoils. This is a beautiful sweet tale of ecology, friendship and sharing good food. Children love identifying objects and in this picture book there are plenty of vegetables to point at and name as well as showing them how plants grow.
5. Uno’s Garden (Graeme Base)
And of course funny little Uno! Winner of the The Wilderness Society Picture Book of the Year 2007, they described Uno’s Garden like this “Uno’s Garden is a lively and lavishly detailed picture book about environmental sustainability. A whimsical imaginary landscape demonstrates the importance of learning from past mistakes to ensure a balanced and liveable future“. See Katie’s fab post here about the Uno’s Garden Myer windows last Christmas.
And mummy is reading this!
The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, it’s a fascinating imagining of what would happen to the planet if humans disappeared.
I came across this beautiful new book the other day, by Helen Ward and Marc Craste.
This book is one that straddles the border between picture book and graphic novel, and is no doubt intended for an older audience than the traditional picture book.(This genre is also being explored with great success by Australian author and illustrator, Shaun Tan, whose book The Arrival has won a host of awards here and overseas.)
The illustrations in Varmints are incredibly evocative, and have been done by film-maker Marc Craste, whose debut short film, Jo Jo in the Stars won the 2004 BAFTA Best Animated Short Film. Marc lends Varmints a wonderfully cinematic feel: the use of tracing paper and even the elements of gloss on the cover give it a feeling of movement, and there is an amazing sense of filmic perspective on the angles taken in the illos.
The text is lyrical and poignant, and works perfectly alongside the images.
Varmints tackles the theme of environmental degradation, and it reminds me a bit of both Dr Seuss’s The Lorax (the ultimate greenie book for kids written long before eco-matters were a daily news item) and Graeme Base’s Uno’s Garden (reviewed by me here).
This is a beautiful book for collectors, and I couldn’t resist it. (I had in mind that I might give it to someone, but by the time I got it home, couldn’t imagine who it would suit better than, well, me!)